Revision as of 18:51, 6 April 2009

Enlightenment Foundation Libraries, or EFL, are the set of libraries used to create the Enlightenment Window Manager DR17 (E17). This set of libraries is not restricted to X11 as Enlightenment WM itself.

Contents

Libraries

Evas object-oriented and stateful 2D canvas, uses retained render mode and is very optimized, both with hardware acceleration with OpenGL and XRender and software. Ships with 32bpp and 16bpp native engines, but can downscale from 32bpp down to 1bpp with dithering on render time.

Edje is a super-theme engine, it builds on top of Evas, Ecore, Embryo, EET and others to provide powerful themes. With it your application themes are not restricted to just replace some images or changing some colors, you can radically change the look and feel. It can be thought as a mix of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. It's based on object states and transition between theirs states, so animations can be easily specified. State descriptions can use relative and absolute positioning, so your interfaces can be scalable yet pixel perfect.

Emotion is a media playback system integrated with Ecore and Evas. It ships with Xine, GStreamer and VLC engines.

Epsilon is an image and video thumbnailer, builds on top of Evas, Ecore and Emotion.

EET data storage library and command line tool, provides ar/zip-similar storage and is optimized for reading. It can handle entry compression, signing and crypto. It bundles an easy to use C-struct serialization, so one can loads complex data from files directly to dynamically allocated C structs or persist them into files. Ideal to save user preferences in an optimized way, but still editable with regular tools/editors if you use eet -e and eet -e. It's used Edje to store theme resources, as fonts, images, descriptions and even embryo scripts.

Embryo is a tiny, simple and fast virtual machine that runs a C subset, derived from PAWN/SMALL.

Old Style Toolkits

Some more traditional toolkits were build on top of EFL but don't expose underneath technologies like Evas or Edje. They're targeted at form-like applications, just like GTK and Qt.

ETK, similar to GTK in API. not being actively developed anymore

EWL, more Model-View-Controller approach.

New Style Toolkits

Some new toolkits were born recently and makes more use of EFL concepts, not just exposing components like Evas and Edje, but truly mixing with them. So far we have two alternatives, but they will merge soon. See Rich GUI without pain ELC-E 2008 talk.

Elementary, targeted at phones, pdas and other touch screen devices. It was originally born as a port of E17 widgets.

Guarana, targeted at digital tv, media centers and other set-top boxes. Guarana is more than just widgets, it also covers module loader, MVC framework and more.